Pathway to Japanese Literature

It was said that newspaper columns called "Life Guidance" and "Personal Consultation" drew the most readers.

However, submissions seeking life guidance here unexpectedly contained few genuine cases—apparently many people would arbitrarily create worries like “let’s try submitting this kind of problem” and send them in. Though the responsible reporters could recognize these at a glance, they knowingly published such fakes precisely because they proved more convenient and entertaining than genuine ones.
For resolving worries was never this column’s purpose—it existed as the foremost reading material in the paper.
Since it needed to offer daily variety as easily digestible entertainment, they diversified their roster of advice-givers too—stocking up on clear-cut types, bold types, weepy types, and scolding types.
Male experts simply weren’t interesting.
Earnestly preaching back and forth about life’s myriad troubles lacked flair when done by great experts sporting imposing mustaches or bald-headed luminaries.
It lacked luster.
The thousand-ryo value resided precisely in female mid-tier experts.
Sensual charm proved essential.
Thus idle men—laboring over their penmanship—must have felt compelled to compose these fabricated agonies.

In a small rural town, there was a man who had been obsessed with submitting to these columns for several years now. He made and sold handcrafted Chinese soba noodles by hand, but since even serving them at his home in that small rural town brought in only about ten customers a day, he would bicycle out to sell in three cities some three or four ri away. Rather than specialized Chinese restaurants, his regular stops were ordinary cafeterias or coffee shops. While taking breaks at these establishments and reading various newspapers, he became an avid reader of Life Guidance.

“Hmm...”
Today’s Ms. Mesugi was really crying.
It was like she had clasped her hands in prayer.
Wow.
“Damn interesting stuff.”

“I can’t stand that weepy type.”
“Ms. Oyama Hadeko’s the only one worth reading.”
“Exactly!”

“Yeah.”
“Right, right.”
“That does get entertaining sometimes.”
“So vigorous.”
“The sharp-tongued parts have real allure.”
“I wonder what face that expert makes.”

“You’re reading it all wrong.”

He’d been sneered at by coffee shop waitresses, but that meant nothing.
These waitresses caked themselves in gaudy makeup year-round, forever nibbling shop wares between customers before shaking their backsides to practice Monroe walks once the place emptied.
Not a shred of allure anywhere.
Yet Life Guidance’s experts carried authority and severity, dignity and passion, tears and learning, etiquette—and hidden allure.
An allure that never ran dry however much you drew from it.

“All right! I’ll submit one too.”

So, disregarding his daytime fatigue, he spent a whole week lamenting the sorrows of a troubled man. Since he lacked suitable worries of his own, it was inevitably a fabrication—yet not with any scheme to deceive the experts; rather, he meant it to be suffused with genuine feeling, so to speak, like a love letter. He zealously wrote these and dispatched them to various newspapers. That there came no reply was simply the ordained fate of love letters, so he refused despondency. With ever more fiery blood, he kept writing.

He began with trite scenarios like falling for Miss A and Miss B simultaneously, progressed to becoming a maiden around nine years old who’d been molested by her male cousin, and ultimately came to produce absurdities such as a twenty-five-year-old raised male who experienced breathing difficulties and involuntary shudders upon seeing strapping figures of the same sex after noticing bodily irregularities. Out of the over sixty letters he had sent, three were accepted, and that proved truly delightful. He felt as though he had persevered through several years of life.

As for this individual—contrary to appearing as a young man—he was Yamada Torajirou, a decent middle-aged man in his thirty-eighth year who had gone to war as a private second class and even been taken prisoner.
Of course he had a wife and children—a six-year-old and a three-year-old.

Ever since becoming obsessed with this, Yadoroku had been neglecting his night work.
He would get up late in the mornings, and his main job was to have the wife make Chinese soba and at best go around selling it.
The only thing he never skipped a day of was selling, because he needed to have newspapers read to him while out, and he didn’t take a break unless there was a severe storm.
Manufacturing fell to the wife and sales to Yadoroku—a division that meant grueling labor for her—but she endured it, reasoning that her disadvantage was simply the fate of being born in Japan, and since it only involved covering paper and stamp costs, it was still better than him obsessing over pachinko.

However, recently their business gradually began to decline.
It was not due to the husband’s obsession with submissions but rather the tragedy of small capital; machine-made Chinese soba began flooding the market in large quantities, and since it was cheaper, theirs no longer sold.
There were indeed some shops that favored handmade Chinese soba, praising its distinct flavor, but these were limited to small coffee shops with only about ten orders a day. Meanwhile, all the large-volume clients switched to machine-made noodles for their lower prices over taste, leaving him with at most thirty orders a day.
Unlike thirty bowls of Chinese soba, with just thirty plain soba, the earnings didn’t amount to much.
They could no longer support a family of four.

“We’ve got to switch jobs—we can’t keep going like this.”

“We don’t have the capital.”

“So you see.”
“You should’ve saved up back when we were selling three hundred, even five hundred a day—instead of buying all those weird books like ‘How to Write Essays,’ ‘How to Write Letters,’ dictionaries, ‘Secrets of Sex’!”
“Give up on Life Guidance already.”
“You gotta become a Day Laborer and work your ass off!”

“Hmm…”
Day Laborer, huh.
A once-thriving Chinese restaurant goes under in the economic slump—die or become a Day Laborer.
The wife and children wail from hunger.
“This could work.”

“What are you saying.”
“You damn fool!”

The wife flew into a rage with a fearsome look on her face, but Torajirou listened intently to her words; shouting “You damn fool!”, he kicked the husband before finally flying into a frenzy—grabbing a kitchen knife to stab… Just as things reached a critical point where someone wrested away the blade—the wife’s frenzy and sorrow, the husband’s heartrending anguish upon witnessing it… such were the scenes he brooded over in his mind.

However, as a practical matter—since letting the family starve was unthinkable—after searching for various jobs and finding no other openings, he ended up becoming a Day Laborer exactly as his wife had spat out in her fit of anger.

★

Though Day Laborer was considered the lowest rung on life’s battlefront，apparently one couldn’t even secure such work right away.
When he lined up at the window，the first month was referred to as Nikumaru，where he only received two hundred yen.
Apparently，it was fated that one could finally receive Day Laborer wages in the second or third month—if one quit before then，that was the end，and this alone couldn’t support a family.
While taking care of their children，his wife managed to get by day to day through side jobs.

What Torajirou found most agonizing after becoming a Day Laborer was being unable to read newspapers.
He had no money to subscribe to newspapers, but neither did his fellow Day Laborer.
When he couldn't read newspapers, he couldn't exactly turn to Life Guidance for instructions on what to do, so he was suddenly stumped.

“Listen, Otake. I need to discuss something—why don’t you become a newspaper delivery person?”

“That’s a part-time job for kids. It won’t make any money.”

“Then… our kids.”

“They’re only six!”

“Is six not old enough?”
“Then…”

He trailed off mid-sentence, but this didn’t mean he’d accepted defeat—that “in that case” wasn’t a surrender to inevitability. In that case, I decided I would become one myself. Having fallen even to being a Day Laborer and impoverished, if I couldn’t read or write Life Guidance anymore, there was no point in living. So he set out for the newspaper distributor’s shop. The shop owner was profoundly astonished at how the world was full of fools who couldn’t grasp the simplest truths of the world.

“Newspaper delivery is a part-time job for kids.”

“There must be adult delivery jobs too.”

“In a place like Tokyo with vast areas—where every household reads papers and swarms of folks want new subscriptions—maybe there’d be adult deliverymen.”
“At my shop, I’d rather have dogs deliver if I could.”

“It’s fine.
“The problem’s you thinking of me as an adult.”
“Just treat me like a kid.”

“When you hear the salary, don’t be shocked.”
“One hour’s ten yen—anything under thirty minutes gets cut off—so twenty yen each for morning and evening.”
“Good pay for country brats, but still not many takers.”

“Forty yen a day.”
“Twelve hundred yen a month.”
“Reliable ’cause I won’t bail.”
“What d’you think?”
“If I deliver fifteen hours daily, how ’bout payin’ me hundred fifty yen each time?”

“Newspapers get delivered proper—mornin’ and evenin’, fixed times.”

“Well, this is a real problem,” he said. “Then here’s what I’ll do. I’ll come here every night at eight, so let me read all the newspapers.”

“My shop sells newspapers,” replied the owner. “If I let people read them for free, I can’t run a business. Go find somewhere that’ll give you free access.”

Without being able to read Life Guidance, he couldn’t find any incentive to write either. He thought that even if he had to cling to a rock until his teeth broke, he needed to reach a status where he could afford newspaper subscriptions—but no matter how grandly he conceived such plans, this immediate predicament remained unsolved.

He cursed and lamented the cruel ways of the world.
The true worries of life seemed fundamentally resistant to being put into words.
He wanted to read newspapers to submit to Life Guidance, but poverty kept him from affording them.
The shop owner wouldn’t hire him even when he promised fifteen hours of daily labor.
Writing “Please solve this problem” would capture genuine distress, but he refused to commit such trivial worries to paper.
Yet calling them trivial was outrageous—to him they were irreplaceable torments—but through columnists’ discerning eyes they were indeed petty concerns, leaving no recourse.
They needed to be grand personages dripping with vermilion blood and searing tears.

“Listen, Otake. I need to discuss something—why don’t you go work at a restaurant? I saw a flyer and asked around—this is a first-class restaurant. From a grand hall that can host banquets for hundreds down to cozy four-and-a-half-mat rooms, it’s a massive establishment with dozens of spaces. Whether you commute or live in, you’ll get three meals at the shop, receive uniforms, and the salary is five thousand yen. In addition, there are tips, so they say it amounts to about ten thousand yen. Anyway, people just can’t stay poor. We’ve got to devise ways to make money—no, even better ways than that—and keep steadily raking it in. Right?”

“How am I supposed to look after the children then?”

“I’ll take care of that.”

“So you don’t plan to work at all?”

“No.”
“That’s not it.”
“I’ll look after the kids and do side work.”
“What’s this side work of yours?”

“Can’t you see I’m doing it right here?”
“It’s needlework.”

“Those small-time things won’t do.”
“In my plan, I’ll take the children to the river and catch fish.”
“Yamame and Ayu would fetch good money.”
“Even if it rains, we won’t necessarily have to bail.”

“If there were an opening where I could work and make ten thousand yen, that’d be a fine story.”
“A grown man loafing around at home and even tending to the children’s food and pee—it’s a pitiful sight.”
“Even as a day laborer, it’d look better to others if you were working.”

“If you work to build up some capital and then I start a business afterward, our appearances would be splendid.”
“Appearances ain’t something to worry about till later.”
“We can’t be worrying about appearances right now.”
“No matter what it takes, we’ve got to do something that makes money.”

“If an employer would have me, I wouldn’t say I won’t work.”
“I’m sick of poverty too.”

“That’s the only way it can be!”
“This is what Life Guidance is all about.”
“In all the world, there’s hardly anyone who understands as deeply as I do that in times like these, this is just how things must be.”
“There was a reason I’d been researching that all along.”
“I’ll handle the Life Guidance, so just leave everything to me like you’re boarding your parents’ boat!”

Otake was a woman who had previously worked at a restaurant. She had been noticed by Torajirou, who frequented the area selling Chinese soba, and became involved with him; at the time, Torajirou’s Chinese soba business was thriving, and even Otake had thought back then that he was the right choice. Otake was a woman who had shed some of her bitter skin. She was a full ten years younger than Torajirou and still twenty-eight. With a little effort, she could be quite presentable, so even for her own sake, the thought of growing old in such poverty filled her with intense regret.

When she applied to the restaurant, after a three-day trial period, she was successfully hired with splendid results.

★

The commute to the restaurant was inconvenient in the countryside.
Unlike Tokyo, there was a lack of transportation options.
Even so, there was a bus that stopped near the restaurant at 1:00 a.m.

It was the bus that had departed Tokyo at ten o'clock. This transported Otake to her own town in about twenty minutes. There was no worry of missing this one, but she often missed the previous bus departing at eleven. This created a gap of nearly two hours. This was not good.

There were two companions who rode the same bus home with Otake in the same direction. Setsu was an older war widow, and Yasu was a recently divorced woman the same age as Otake. Generally speaking, there were few young girls among the waitresses there.

When Setsu and Yasu missed the bus, they would search out regular customers or summon them to small eateries and have them treat everyone to drinks until the 1:00 a.m. bus arrived.
In some cases—and this happened frequently—they would grow too familiar with customers and vanish without boarding the bus, leaving Otake who had been keeping them company either stranded alone or subjected to persistent advances from other patrons.

“What’s the big deal?”
“Quit putting on airs about having a husband already.”
“What husband?”
“That failure.”
“Making his wife work while he lazes around at home.”
“Staring at manuscript paper’s all fine—you’d think he’s writing a novel—but turns out he’s just some Life Guidance submission maniac.”
“Never heard such nonsense!”
“‘I have a fiancée named A-ko,’ he writes, ‘but after getting drunk at a banquet and being coaxed by a friend to stay in the red-light district, I came to know B-ko’s heart and can’t forget it.’”
“Let me read it and I burst out laughing.”
“And he’s thirty-eight with that?”
“You’re living with a freak, I tell you.”
“Showing loyalty to a husband like that—no proper woman would do that.”
“Even mutts or blue rat snakes might show that kinda loyalty to their master.”
“There’s no human lower than that.”
“Quit this loyalty crap.”
“You’ve no idea how much smarter it’d be to shack up with customers and make money.”

One day, Yasu got drunk and, unable to bear it any longer, launched into a tirade.
It might be tempting to dismiss this as a divorcee’s petty jealousy, but in truth, that wasn’t necessarily the case.
The reason was that Otake had recently come to feel with increasing intensity that Yamada Torajirou’s very existence seemed like a rare species seldom encountered.

Otake contributed only 5,000 yen to the household each month. The rest she spent on her personal necessities and incidentals, occasionally buying things for the children as well, but Torajirou used one-tenth of the 5,000 yen meant for living expenses for himself and the two children to subscribe to newspapers, and from morning until late at night he devoted himself without respite to agonizing over and composing all sorts of Life Guidance submissions.

Moreover, he had recently taken to growing a small mustache beneath his philtrum.

Those who became obsessed with pachinko or keirin bicycle racing might also be considered troublesome cases, but since their kind existed in abundance everywhere, their human significance was never called into question; however, the existence of a thirty-eight-year-old Life Guidance fanatic who had finally grown a small mustache struck others as truly bizarre.

The foolishness and squalor of him—caring for two children yet immersed in Life Guidance submissions amid utter destitution, neither flustered nor hurried—grew increasingly eerie by the day; whenever she approached the house and prepared to step over the threshold, a chill ran down her spine.

The notion that only mixed-breed dogs or blue snakes would show such loyalty was truly a spot-on remark, and Otake could not help but privately agree wholeheartedly.
It wasn’t as if she was proudly going around boasting about “the husband” or anything like that.
She couldn’t pretend he didn’t exist and had merely mentioned that there was a husband waiting at home.
When criticized by Yasu and Setsu, she felt an inexplicable sense of liberation.

“He’s not a husband I can boast about to anyone, but given how things have turned out, there’s no helping it.”
“Lately, whenever I see that small mustache he’s started growing beneath his nose, I get this uneasy feeling in my chest.”
“My blood rushes to my head one moment and plummets the next.”
“I’ve learned my lesson—I’ll vet my next man properly.”

Otake had completely changed as a person.

It was only natural that a woman who had suffered under a lazy husband, once she went out to work and immersed herself in a lively and luxurious world, would find herself unable to return to her dark nest again.
A husband, when living in rock-bottom poverty, must never send his wife out to work.

The poorer one became, the more he alone should have gritted his teeth and worked himself to the bone to protect his wife and children.
Making a wife work was something people with comfortable lives should do to enrich their existence, but if someone driven by dire poverty compelled their wife into labor, then her inability to return to that dark household might even be seen as weak men’s tragic fate.

If she had become a housemaid or something of that sort, it might have been different, but once a woman placed herself in that boisterously lively world of waitresses and barmaids, it was only natural that the nest she emerged from became unbearable to look upon and impossible to remain in.
When she dressed up and polished herself, Otake had a certain charm and an abundance of emotion that stirred men’s hearts, so there were not a few men who approached her; but since she now thought she had to vet them properly, she was not easily taken in by philanderers’ sweet talk.

Yazawa, the fabric shop owner, was courting her not out of fleeting desire but with genuine infatuation, and there was such an uncommonly worn-out air about him that she concluded someone like this would be safe enough. Thus she entered into an arrangement with Yazawa as her secret paramour and entrusted herself to him.

Yazawa wasn’t in a position to dally with women and stay out nightly either, so initially he would drive her home in his private car, but Otake gradually grew bolder—even after Yazawa departed, she began bedding down until morning at hot spring lodgings marked by the symbol. This was how Torajirou too came to gradually suspect his wife’s behavior.

★

As he gradually investigated and came to realize she seemed to have taken up with the fabric shop owner, Torajirou struck Otake two or three times,

“You! You’ve been bedding another man!”
“What do you mean by smearing mud on your husband’s face?”

“If mud gets wet, I’ll splash it all I want.”
“You’ve no idea how much that helps people!”
“Plenty of folks get queasy or sick just looking at your face.”
“Since going out into the real world, I’ve learned there’s not another fool like you in all creation.”
“All this time I’ve been fooled.”
“You damn animal!”
“Putting on airs like a human.”
“You’re not even human.”
“Go keep company with mutts or blue snakes if you want loyalty.”
“You half-formed newt!”
“Even tadpoles look better than you once they grow legs and put on clothes.”
“Don’t throw around words like ‘lover’ like you know anything.”
“Stop pretending to be human.”
“Drop the act and crawl back into the sewers where you belong!”

“You! Don’t mistake me for an earthworm.”
“Do you think an earthworm could become a soldier and go off to war in China?”
“An earthworm can’t make Chinese soba.”
“And then you pull this shit!”

“That’s a lie!”
“I’ll never lay eyes on your damn face again!”

She rushed out of the house just like that.

Torajirou was in a bind too.
Though furious, being left with two children and no longer receiving the five thousand yen meant that from that day onward, he would be hard-pressed to get by.
However regrettable, he had to bow deeply, apologize, and beg her to return.
Moreover, the newly acquired sensuality that had begun to emanate from Otake was marred by far too many flaws.

Yamada Torajirou took his two children and visited the restaurant, and despite Otake’s refusal to meet him, prevailed upon her to see them,

“I acted roughly the other day, and for that I’m truly sorry.”
“With us having two children together, if you abandon them and leave me behind, I’ll have no choice but to die.”
“Please come back.”

“It’s because you’re like this that I can’t stand it.”
“There are plenty of widows working and raising three or four children all by themselves.”
“If you’re a man, shouldn’t that make it even more expected?”
“Saying you can’t support your kids and have to die—that’s what bedridden tuberculosis patients say.”
“You’re perfectly healthy—what’s your excuse for not working?”
“Isn’t supporting your wife and children a man’s duty?”
“I can’t live with someone so ridiculously obsessed with Life Guidance nonsense they’ve forgotten how to work.”

“We’ve managed to live together up till now, haven’t we?”

“It’s because I didn’t know the wider world back then.”
“Now just one glance at your face makes my skin crawl.”
“It’s gotten so I can’t see you as my own kind anymore—what else can I do?”
“What were you thinking, having children to support?”
“It’s only natural children get raised through a man’s work.”
“If you can’t even raise them, then take the kids and leave me alone!”

“Unlike women, men don’t have it so easy when it comes to finding work.”

“If you’re truly willing to do anything, there must be work.”
“The reason you think there isn’t any is because you’re a slacker.”
“Since you don’t seem to realize that, you’re not fit to live on tatami mats.”
“You’d be better off disappearing into the gutter.”

“You must really take me for an earthworm, but the truth is—look at me—I’m human through and through.”
“My ancestors have been human for generations.”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“If you already know that, then come back.”
“Look—I’m down on my hands and knees begging you.”
“I won’t act like the husband anymore.”
“When you come home every night, I’ll boil hot water to wipe your back and limbs, and all summer long I’ll fan you with a round fan till you fall asleep.”

“You still haven’t mustered the will to work yourself.”
“I wasn’t born to cohabitate with round fans and steamed towels.”

“You’re impossible.”
“It’s precisely because I’m the kind of human who moves that round fan and wrings steamed towels that this is where human worth lies.”
“This is why I’m saying that if I spend my whole life diligently doing such worthwhile things, you should come back.”
“You understand now, right?”

“A man’s worth lies in working to comfortably support his wife and children.”
“Earthworm, get lost and don’t come back!”
“Don’t ever come back again.”

Otake kicked the seat and stood up.
Otake’s colleagues, who had been observing the situation from outside the shoji, could no longer contain themselves and burst out laughing.
Unable to stay any longer, Torajirou took the children’s hands and returned in vain.

After that, he visited the restaurant countless times, but Otake refused to meet him.
He couldn’t manage it himself, so he asked his friend Hikosaku—a public scribe at the government office who was eloquent and well-versed in the law—to plead his case on his behalf, but she refused to live with round fans and steamed towels, and even more so, she could no longer endure cohabiting with an earthworm.
It was a splendid reply: the only person she wished to live with was a man who could properly support his wife and children.
Hikosaku returned in complete admiration.
Hikosaku immediately turned to Torajirou and said,

“No, what Ms. Otake says is perfectly reasonable.”
“You’re the one who’s absolutely unacceptable.”
“If you don’t work and support your wife and children, you’re not a man.”

“It’s an era of unemployment—there’s no work to be had, so what can I do?”

“I heard about that from Ms. Otake, but weren’t you working as a day laborer?”
“However, just because you wanted to read and write Life Guidance, you quit being a day laborer and made Ms. Otake go out to work—isn’t that what happened?”

“Since Otake’s income was higher than what I made as a day laborer, we switched to whichever brought in more.”
“It’s not because I’m a slacker.”
“If I could become Otake’s substitute and do Otake’s job to earn Otake’s income, I’d gladly do so, but since substitution isn’t possible, there’s nothing to be done.”

“If you hadn’t made Ms. Otake shoulder all the work alone and had done your own labor instead, things wouldn’t have come to this.”
“This rust grew from your own blade.”
“Change your ways—work to raise the children from now on, show Ms. Otake your efforts through action, and get her to return.”

“Are you going to let Otake keep a lover until then?”

“Well.”
“That’s the crux of it.”
“That is precisely what Life Guidance has always been about.”
“This time, you should write about your genuine circumstances truthfully and seek answers through Life Guidance.”
“However, before that, the crucial point is that first and foremost you must start working tomorrow, and Life Guidance should be written in whatever spare time you find.”
“I’ll be eagerly waiting for that Life Guidance response too.”

Hikosaku left these words behind and departed.
Torajirou was in no position to seek genuine Life Guidance.

First and foremost, he had to find a household that would take in the children.
Finally finding a household that would take them in as foster children with payment deferred—free for the time being—he left the children there and resumed being a day laborer.

The remaining paper and pen were still perfectly intact, yet for some reason, he was unable to write a genuine account of his circumstances and seek Life Guidance. First of all, whenever he saw paper and pen, his whole body would shudder violently, and he’d suddenly shut his eyes. Life Guidance seemed to thrive on fabricated pleasures. Torajirou, who had long indulged in the pleasures of fabrication, already knew he had keenly felt Life Guidance’s powerlessness in the face of the genuine.

No matter what the Life Guidance response might be, the wife in Life Guidance and Otake were not the same person.

The Life Guidance columnist couldn’t possibly know that Otake treated him like an earthworm, concluded that dressing other tadpole-like men in jumpers made them more respectable than her husband, or stated that showing obligation to a husband was something only mongrel dogs and blue snakes did—and even then, just a few.

“Even if it’s a genuine story, there’s no way I could write that far. First off, getting so wrapped up in Life Guidance has left me too messed up to write anything proper. The damn world won’t stay still. If Life Guidance only works with fake stuff, maybe life itself—hell, maybe people—are better off being half-assed. If I let my guard down, maybe this whole world I’m seeing is fake, and I’m the only real thing left. Gives me the creeps just thinking about it. Knock on wood, knock on wood. Those Life Guidance bigshots might just be shape-shifting tanuki for all I know. Ah well, no helping it. Might as well leave my fate to heaven and drift through life as a day laborer.”

And so, he had come to somewhat realize this truth.